A song, a place, a scent… Small details can take us back in time, generating a feeling of nostalgia and triggering intense emotions. Nostalgia implies a longing to return to a certain period of life, a desire to relive those significant experiences that still generate intense emotional waves. However, that feeling is more intense in some periods of life.
Nostalgia increases with the years
Researchers at the University of Akron found that homesickness is more common as we get older. They also appreciated that it can trigger both positive feelings and a negative mood.
These researchers recruited 100 people between the ages of 18 and 78, who downloaded an application on their smartphones to answer a daily questionnaire for two weeks. Every day they answered questions related to nostalgia, indicating whether or not they had experienced this feeling during the day.
As expected, age was a predictor of daily homesickness: Young people reported homesickness 60% less than middle-aged adults. Instead, older adults reported three times more nostalgic feelings than middle-aged people. Men and women experienced nostalgia alike.
In a general sense, it is logical that older people are more nostalgic since they have had more life experiences that can generate these feelings of longing. When they look back, they have more experiences to remember and even more experiences in the present can take them back to the past, so it is understandable that they may feel more nostalgic.
Is there positive nostalgia?
Nostalgia is a complex and ambivalent emotion. Most people experience it positively, but there are also those who experience it negatively.
For example, these researchers found that experiencing nostalgia was associated with both positive and negative mood changes: 72% of participants reported an increase in positive affect in response to nostalgia, while 51% reported an increase in negative affect.
Younger and middle-aged people were more likely to experience positive emotions in response to nostalgia than older people, for whom nostalgia was related to more negative mood.
These psychologists explain that our emotional response to nostalgia seems to become more negative over the years because as we get older we remember more important moments in our lives and not all of them are positive.
However, we also know that when nostalgia generates positive feelings it can boost our self-esteem and even fill us with optimism for the future. In fact, deliberately looking back for memories in our past can decrease the chances of suffering from depression, since this exercise provides some meaning to our lives, helping us to free ourselves from sadness or suffering.
In this sense, psychologists from the University of North Dakota believe that nostalgia is ultimately a future-oriented emotional experience. It encourages us to reflect on past experiences, but it generates affective states, behaviors and goals that improve our lives for the future.
However, we can use positive nostalgia as a source of inspiration to recover lost energy, connect with those we love, or even to keep certain traditions alive. We can use it to feel happy for what was, experience gratitude for what we have lived, and project ourselves into the future to create new positive memories.
Sources:
Turner, J. R., & Stanley, J. T. (2021). Holding on to pieces of the past: Daily reports of nostalgia in a life-span sample. Emotion; 21(5): 951–961.
Fiorito, T. & Routledge, C. (2020) Is Nostalgia a Past or Future-Oriented Experience? Affective, Behavioral, Social Cognitive, and Neuroscientific Evidence. Front. Psychol; 11: 10.3389.
